Benjamin Rush's course in chemistry at the young ladies' academy
✍ Scribed by Marion B. Savin; Harold J. Abrahams
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1956
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 672 KB
- Volume
- 262
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0016-0032
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
One of colonial Philadelphia's most important men and leading scientists was Benjamin Rush, physician and chemist. At the age of fourteen, in 1760, he took his B.A. at the school which later became Princeton. As was usual for the training of physicians in those days, he served as an apprentice and, after five and one-half years, sailed for Scotland to complete his training at the University of Edinburgh, which had one of the finest medical schools in the world at the time.
Having determined before leaving Philadelphia to be a candidate for the projected, but as yet non-existent, professorship of chemistry at the Medical School of the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania) he was careful to learn as much as possible from Dr. Joseph Black, probably the best British chemistry teacher at the time.
He received the degree of doctor of medicine from Edinburgh in 1768, then spent some months at the hospitals of London. After a visit to Paris he revisited London to study industrial chemistry in the factories. He returned to Philadelphia in July 1769 and on August 1st was elected the first professor of chemistry in the Medical School of the College of Philadelphia.
In those days a person teaching this subject had little of the needed teaching equipment with which to work. Fortunately, while Rush was in England he met Thomas Penn, proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, who asked him to take back to the college a gift of "a chymical apparatus . . . of great use . . .